NYC’s Staten Island Ferry

My daughter’s No. 1 priority on our New York trip was to see the Statue of Liberty. Of course, this was the one thing I didn’t want to do. When I visited NYC as a child with my mother and grandmother, I remember going on a miserable boat ride to Liberty Island where we stood in a long line to the crown. A girlfriend who visited NYC with her children last winter waited in the freezing cold for fours. Nightmare!

But Paris’s incessant pleading made me realize that my 5-year-old child knows only one thing about NYC and that’s the Statue of Liberty. Would I bring her to Paris and not show her the Eiffel Tower? Never.

Still, I was determined to pay our regards to Lady Liberty without waiting in a line. How? The Staten Island Ferry, which was actually recommended by a reader blogger, dk_brown, on this site. The boat travels between Battery Park in lower Manhattan and St. George on Staten Island. The free, 25-minute ride offers views of the skyline and passes directly by Liberty and Ellis islands. You don’t get to set foot on either but the ferry gets you close enough that you can see the gold sparkling at the top of the torch.

As our ferry chugged by the island, my son asked, “Why is the Statue of Liberty so small?” and then he sat back down in his seat to play with a matchbox car. But my daughter pressed her nose against the window and gazed in awe at the minty green statue. “She’s so beautiful Mommy!” Touched, I started to sing “America the Beautiful.” Paris quickly covered my mouth. “You’re ruining it, Mommy!”